“Look here,” Frampton said, “what you tell me about your being a Holtspur is very interesting to me. Here’s breakfast, if you take that sort of thing. After breakfast, I want you to come out with me. I want to talk to you.”
He left her then; he could not stand it any longer. He went out again along the brook and speared some dams. Zapritska, who could see him from her bed, wondered what the sacred
The Haulover was out of the way discreetly. The other four dancers were not yet down, and were not like to be down, the maids thought. Frampton presently found Sorya in the garden, looking at the long and lovely line of
“Do you know England well?” he asked.
“No. I’ve danced here; a summer season in London, and two tours. I’ve danced in most countries, but I like England best, on the whole.”
“On the whole I do,” he said.
It struck her as an odd remark. She looked at him with interest and saw that he spoke sincerely. That was the first breaking of the ice between them.
“I was out, in that direction,” she said, pointing up the valley. “There is some building there. Is that another suburb?”
“It is a place I am building for some of my workers,” he said. “I want to make some of my poisons here.”
“It doesn’t look quite the place for making poisons,” she said.
“It’s the very place,” he said. “But my poisons are compounds which in other syntheses can be fertilisers and so forth. I can beat my swords into ploughshares in some cases.”
“But the building is beautiful; even already one can see that; it is not a factory.”
“You have been out there, already?” he said. “You saw the sort of chapter-house. I want my chaps to have all the chances I had myself.”
“That isn’t very usual among your countrymen,” she said.
“It’s a want that’s growing,” he said. “The wealth of a land isn’t money, which is largely a fiction, when it isn’t actually a fraud. Real wealth is intelligence, want of waste, want of folly, want of redundancy. The sort of thing you get in art and training. A land that has a people who are healthy and intelligent is a wealthy land. Looking at the world, I’d say that wealth’s as rare as genius.”
“And how do your people respond to your advance?” she asked.
“They are like all people. They respond to any call properly made. The worker’s a bit mistrustful of an employer, and I don’t wonder. The brain’s been bred right out of half of both sides, in this thing called commerce. I put a lot of backs up, but some of my chaps have begun to see my point.”
“I should think they have,” she said, looking at him curiously; for she liked a generosity in men and employers, and had seen something of the harshness of commerce. She had been told that the
He had meant to show her the portraits of Margaret where they hung on the wall in his room, but they had now turned up the stream together, past the house towards the lake. He had his two-prong with him, from old habit. The sun and the wind of the clearing weather made the valley marvellous to them; some little company of goldfinches picked at the thistledown and flitted from their coming.
“I want to tell you something,” Frampton said. “I was engaged to be married to Margaret Holtspur, a cousin of yours. She was killed in a motor-car, just before our wedding. I built this house for her. You are so like her. You can see how like you are. There’s a set of photographs here; and there are portraits in the room at the end of the top floor there. I want you to look at them presently. You must forgive me. You’ll think me pretty cool, to ask you here because of that. I had to tell you. There’s a sort of cousin of yours, a bird-painter, in the wood yonder. You must meet him later. I’ll leave these photographs with you and clear out.”
He did this rather roughly, and was away at once, up to the lake, and along its north shore in great strides, jabbing at the scattered leaves as he passed. He went along to the lake end, then struck away into the covert, and so west to Spirr, where he found Timothy just up, frying bacon, while tits and chaffinches hopped about his untidy room.
“I want a word with you,” Frampton said. “Do you know anything of some cousins of yours in Russia?”
“I know there used to be some,” Timothy said, “but I think they rather got killed off in the troubles.”
“They rather did,” Frampton said grimly, “but some of them didn’t, and one of them’s up at the house. You’d better come up to lunch to meet her.”
“O God, I’m not very tidy.”
“Come as you are.”
“I say, won’t you sit down? I’ll shove these books aside, then you can sit on the window-seat.”
“You mind your bacon,” Frampton said. “I’ll do it.”